Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Number of staff at DWP investigating benefit fraud of £1.2 billion.
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300.
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Number of staff at HMRC investigating tax evasion of £70 billion plus.
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You're right to wonder, Tim.
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The social media post is broadly right about the benefit fraud figures.
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The DWP says there are 3,250 people investigating benefit fraud.
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The most recent DWP figures estimate there was £1.1 billion of fraud last year, and the year before that the figure was £1.2 billion.
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With regard to the figure for tax evasion, £70 billion is a pretty controversial estimate.
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When you think about it, the truth is a bit slippery here.
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For one thing, there are different flavours of unpaid tax, from outright fraud to honest mistakes to tax avoidance, which HMRC defines as an attempt to bend the law rather than break it to get an advantage that Parliament did not intend.
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Well, one of the problems is that nobody knows how much tax is illegally evaded because tax wards don't usually confess to all the details.
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The £70 billion figure comes from a piece of research commissioned by the PCS union, which represents tax inspectors amongst others.
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Now, there is a methodology behind the number, but the purpose of the research was also to make the case that more money should be spent on staff to investigate tax evasion.
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This number is also popular amongst tax justice campaigners.
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But it's a lot more than HMRC's own most recent estimate, which is £15.2 billion a year for tax evasion, the hidden economy and criminal acts.
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If you include tax avoidance, non-payment of taxes, errors and other issues, some of which are also clearly well worth investigating, you get a tax gap of £35 billion, which is well short of £70 billion.
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If we're comparing official estimates from HMRC and the DWP, outright benefit fraud is £1.1 billion and outright tax fraud is £15.2 billion, around 12 times as much.
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Well, in terms of the claim that only 300 people are working on tax evasion, that's just wrong.
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HMRC says that refers to a dedicated team specifically investigating the rich.
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But HMRC claim that tax dodgers in general have to reckon with a squadron of 30,000 investigators.
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Showing 461–480 of 1,889 · page 24 of 95
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